Current reflective display technologies have difficulty providing bright, high contrast, color images. One of the issues with such display technologies generally is that most require an active matrix with a transistor at each pixel in the display area. The transistors and the associated connections and electrodes reduce the optical aperture of the display and therefore reduce the brightness of the reflected light. Bistable liquid crystal displays can employ a passive matrix to control the electro-optic effect of each pixel and provide a larger aperture for the reflected light because transistors are not needed in the display area. Further, in some configurations, bistable liquid crystal displays can dramatically reduce power consumption, particularly if the same image is displayed for an extended period of time. However, bistable systems commonly only use one polarization of incident light and use polarizers, which reduce the brightness of a reflective display by at least half. Further, current bistable displays do not provide a sufficient dynamic range for display of a quality color image.
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